


Going Overboard

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 5 year gap fic, F/M, Mostly Fluff, a little blood but not too bad, and some poison, background mercedes/sylvain if you want, plus a sword fight, they'll be fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:41:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24577720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Sylvain swears he knows where to get a boat. Felix swears he knows how to fight left-handed. Annette swears she can run in high heels.Mercedes just swears, but it’s mostly under her breath.A one shot about how Three Housescouldhave had ship battles if we’d all just believed in ourselves a bit more.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 18
Kudos: 67





	Going Overboard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightMereBear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightMereBear/gifts).



As was usually the case, Felix’s first mistake was trusting Sylvain. In this case, it was trusting him when Sylvain assured him that he knew where he could find a boat. It was also trusting Sylvain when he suggested that a ship could get them out of Fraldarius easily. Both, in retrospect, were poor decisions. But Sylvain had made the excellent point that, as they were heading to the Millennium Festival with two hostages, it might be best to avoid Dukedom forces, and instead sail from Fraldarius to Derdriu and journey through Alliance territory instead.

The two hostages were probably the second mistake, if Felix had to rank them. Or the first, if you went chronologically. He was starting to lose track of his mistakes, regardless.

Mercedes had written to Sylvain, according to him, begging for him to help her escape Fhirdiad. Felix hadn’t understood why _he_ had gotten roped into another one of Sylvain’s harebrained plans until they arrived at an abandoned church on the outskirts of Fhirdiad in the dead of night and found not one but two figures waiting for them. Evidently Annette and Mercedes’s grand scheme for slipping away was to tell each of their guardians that they were spending the night at the other one’s house, and then to meet at this church instead. It was such a stupid plan that Felix was a little bit mad it actually worked. But it had worked, and now they traveled with two damsels, cruelly taken from their homes in Fhirdiad, and Felix still wasn’t sure why Sylvain had thought it so necessary for him to come along, beyond needing a wingman so he could flirt with Mercedes. He also wasn’t sure why Annette hadn’t thought to write to him for help in the first place.

Felix’s third mistake was agreeing to stop in an inn to get a drink and some food before they left, when they’d already found the boat and confirmed its sea-worthiness and dropped their stuff off and were completely in reach of an anonymous escape from Faerghus and its soldiers. And at first, watching Annette giggle at Sylvain and eagerly munch on something sweet and deep fried and sticky and lose herself in half goblet of wine until she was eventually giggling at _him_ just as much – at first, that had seemed like a good idea. He wouldn’t admit it, especially when she cheerfully shoved the deep fried sticky dough towards him, as if he couldn’t smell the sugar from halfway across the table, but he had almost convinced himself that this was going to work.

It was when the man stopped at their table and gave them an unpleasant, appraising glance that Felix remembered – all of Sylvain’s ideas were bad.

“I wouldn’t expect to see fancy brats like you hanging out in a place like this,” the man said. His voice was rough and suspicious, a sword hanging at his hip, his muscles bulging through his shirt as he leaned on the table to leer over them. Annette dropped her dumplings with a squeak and scooted closer to Felix; Mercedes’s face remained passive, like a statue of a saint when the sculptor was going through a phase based in judgment and wrath.

“The goddess sees fit to bring all sorts of travels together, sir,” she said to him, her voice as light as air and her eyes as sharp as arrows. “If you find it so odd, I’m sure we cannot be of any interest to you, but I wish you well on your journey.”

“Keep walking,” Felix snarled in translation, and his eyes matched his voice for sharpness and anger.

“Not sure I will,” the man said slowly, and he seemed to enjoy the way Annette squirmed when he leaned over her, looking at Felix more closely. “You know,” he says, tapping his fingers on the table dangerously close to Annette’s mostly-empty wine goblet, “You two look an awful lot like those two noble whelps that are wanted for kidnapping those two holy girls out of Fhirdiad.”

“It wasn’t _kidnap_ –” Annette blurted out, and slammed her hand over her mouth, but not before the man swiveled her eyes over her and Mercedes in a way that made Felix reach for his sword and Sylvain reach for Mercedes.

“And _you_ look like two holy girls who are wanted for being kidnapped by two noble whelps,” he concluded, his eyes glinting greedily, and Felix wondered why they had to have run into the only bounty hunter out of Fraldarius who actually had brains and hadn’t been snapped up yet by his father’s army. “My, my, my,” he said, clicking his tongue. “The goddess really does see it fit to bring the strangest people together.”

Glasses and dishware and sticky, sticky dumplings went flying in all directions as Sylvain flipped the table, and Felix felt a malicious glee as an empty tankard clipped the man in the side of the head. He gave a snarl of anger, but the four of them were already running out the door, Mercedes only stopping to throw some coin at the extremely annoyed innkeeper before she grabbed Sylvain’s hand and rushed in the street.

Which brought Felix to his fourth and final mistake, which was assuming Annette was able to run in that dress of hers, long and stylish and hugging her curves where the skirt once might have flared outwards. He’d like that style, too, at one point that afternoon, which just went to show how quickly things could change.

“Can you maybe run a little faster?” he gasped, casting a jealous glance at Mercedes and Sylvain as they booked it around a corner and into an alleyway.

“Yes, Felix, absolutely,” Annette said. “I’ll just use my wind magic to _levitate_ and then I can fly all the way to the boat.” She held her skirt up in one hand and clung to Felix with the other, and it seemed to throw her off balance as she crashed against him.

“Wait, really?” Felix asked, nudging her back upright and shooting her an impressed glance.

“No!” Annette snapped, and she let go of her skirts to throw her hand out behind her, wind ricocheting in violent and unpredictable directions but knocking debris into the path of their pursuer. Felix’s glance was still impressed, even if she did the trip outright on her too-long dress, and he quickly swooped her back on her feet before tugging her into that same alleyway.

By the time they reached the boat, Sylvain and Mercedes were already on board, hurriedly preparing to set sail. A small gangplank connected the boat to the dock, and Felix frantically pushed Annette ahead of him onto the ramp.

“Get on the boat and don’t trip,” he said quickly. Annette stuck her tongue out at him – boldly childish, given the circumstances - but turned to walk up the rickety gangplank with steadier gait than he had expected. Felix breathed a sigh of relief as she made her way to the top of the plank, and he turned just in time to see the bounty hunter swinging his sword down.

Felix’s sword was out of his scabbard and parrying the blow before he could even comprehend danger, but every nerve ending and brain cell he had was screaming _danger_ as he took a step back, the bounty hunter pressing him backwards up the gangplank.

“Felix, stop fighting random thugs and get on board,” Sylvain shouted to him. “We’re almost ready to go.”

“Working on it,” Felix yelled over his shoulder. He swiped another blow at the bounty hunter and was pleased to see the man’s reaction time was slow. Felix didn’t particularly want him boarding the boat – he didn’t trust that sword against Mercedes or Annette, who would have nowhere to run – but as long as he could keep him distracted on the gangplank, they might have a chance.

The bounty hunter hit slow, but hard, and while Felix was able to match him two strikes for one, he felt himself being pushed backwards with every parry. He frowned, and lunged forward – his lateral motion was limited by water on each side, so he wasn’t able to attack from the side, but he couldn’t afford to be pressed back much further. His ploy was successful, and he cut a deep gash across his opponent’s torso and only received a minor scratch on his arm in return. Felix suppressed a victorious smile – he didn’t smile in the best of times, and this might have qualified as the worst of times – and readied his sword for another attack, sure that this would be the blow to finish the job, or at least chase the man away.

Until he felt a prickling in his sword arm, a deeper, insidious pain spreading upwards towards his elbow. He glanced down at his arm in surprise, and his eyes widened in horror. The scratch across his forearm, while shallow, was mottled with purple, the sure sign of a poisoned blade. He was already beginning to lose his grip, he realized, the feeling in his fingers numbing.

The bounty hunter laughed, ugly and vicious. “Having trouble holding that sword, boy?” he asked mockingly. “Put your weapon down and your hands up and maybe I’ll let you live. A generous offer, you know – I only need your girlfriends alive, after all.”

Felix narrowed his eyes at the man and shifted his sword to his other hand. He brought it cross-body in front of him, as if to block passage up to the ship as directly as possible.

“No,” he said.

His brief satisfaction of seeing a look of shock flash over the bounty hunter’s eyes was short-lived. For one thing, his entire arm was throbbing now, a steady pulse still out of time with his heartbeat. For another, the bounty hunter quickly narrowed his eyes as he took a step backwards.

“It’s all well and good to try and fight, brat,” he spat out. “But unless I give you the antitoxin, that poison is going to go straight to your heart. I don’t think your little friend is going to like you quite as much when you stop breathing, do you?”

“Will you leave her the fu –” Felix snapped, anger flooding his eardrums so loudly that he thought he imagined the high-pitched “Wait!” that cut off his reply.

Annette darted in front of Felix, holding her hands out to the side – which on the surface looked as if she was keeping the bounty hunter from getting around her to Felix, but Felix knew had a lot more to do with keeping _him_ from charging at the bounty hunter.

“Don’t hurt him, please,” Annette said, her voice begging in a way that made Felix’s stomach twist. “We didn’t want any trouble. We’re just leaving town, we won’t hurt you.”

The bounty hunter gave her a greedy, malicious smile. “Of course you won’t hurt me,” he said smugly. “The question we’re debating right now is how much I’m going to hurt –”

The wind spell seemed to crash into him from a half a dozen different directions. Felix hadn’t even seen Annette move her hands, yet her hair whipped backwards and she was suddenly flinging her wrists out, another round of verdant light smashing down on the bounty hunter with deadly force. The final streak of magic barreled into him from the side, swooping out over the ocean before zeroing in for contact, and he tumbled sideways over the gangplank, his arms windmilling into the empty air.

Annette darted forward before Felix, with his delayed reaction time and useless sword arm, could stop her. She grabbed the man’s shirt, frantically grasping at his waist as he flailed. Felix’s yell came too late as the sword bashed against her shoulder, and Annette’s whole body convulsed, but she held on. Felix didn’t understand why she was trying to save the man. She was too kind for her own good, too desperate to see the worth in others in a world that would only hurt her and leave her for –

Annette gave a victorious laugh as she held the antitoxin over her head, letting the man fall into the ocean below with a loud splash.

“Hope he can swim alright,” she said as she did a slow half-jog up the gangplank to where Felix was standing. She gave him a bright smile, and her giggle was as girlish as it was terrifying. She then collapsed against him as her legs gave out, and Felix could hear her cry of pain even as she tried to suppress it, even as his own vision was beginning to swim in front of him. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, and Felix could see the same purple welts at the edges of her injury. She clutched the antitoxin for dear life in her other hand, but her fingers were already clumsy and weak as she held onto his shirt for some semblance of balance.

Felix half-dragged Annette up the gangplank, scarcely able to balance her and his sword at the same time. He felt sluggish and heavy as he kicked the ramp away from the boat, spotting the bounty hunter thrashing in the water angrily, moving towards land.

“Ready to set sail,” he called over his shoulder to Sylvain, who appeared to be arguing with Mercedes about who got to steer the ship for the first hour.

He then collapsed against the side of the boat, barely managing to keep Annette from crashing to the ground as his legs gave out from under him and they both sank against the deck.

“That was so stupid, why did you do that,” he said to her through blurry vision. His entire arm was numb now.

Annette pushed herself up, bracing herself against the side of the ship. “Do you ever say thank you, Felix Fraldarius?” she asked, slurring his name into about four syllables and one single word. She held up the antitoxin vial. “All poisons are different. Mercie might’ve kept you alive, but you would’ve had an unpleasant ride to Derdriu if I hadn’t snagged this.”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve let me have an unpleasant ride to Derdriu, then,” Felix muttered, watching her struggle to open the vial. Her fingers looked as numb as his felt. “Let me,” he interrupted,” snatching the bottle from her and uncorking the cap with his teeth. The potion was foul-smelling and somehow too thick, and he grimaced at it as he held it towards Annette. “You first,” he said, turning it towards her.

Annette shook her head weakly. “It’s a time game, with poison,” she said. “You should go first.”

Felix opened his mouth to argue, and then remembered just how long arguments with Annette could take. Rolling his eyes to avoid conceding anything to her, he knocked back half of the antitoxin in one gulp, grimacing – it somehow tasted worse than it smelled. 

“Here, now will you take it?” he said, roughly shoving the antitoxin under her nose. “Don’t drop it,” he added, earning him a glare from Annette, but her movements felt slow and heavy as she grabbed it out of his hands. Her cut must have been deeper, or wider, or closer to her heart. She grasped the bottle with both hands as she drank the potion, the same way she’d clung to an oversized goblet much more happily a mere hour ago. It would have been kind of adorable if her fingers weren’t shaking so hard and the blood from the cut wasn’t oozing through the shoulder of her fashionable dress. She drained the rest of the antitoxin in one steady sip and dropped the empty vial, coughing violently as it clattered to the ground. Annette braced herself against the side of the ship as her coughing subsided, shook her head a few times, and looked up at Felix with a smile that was weak, but somehow even more brilliant than any she’d given him across the table that afternoon.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, as if he was the one who needed help.

“Fine,” Felix said shortly. “Better.” He flexed his fingers, and they moved easily, and he was surprised, as always, at how quickly the antitoxin worked.

“Good,” Annette said, her voice still slightly dazed and out of focus. “That means I grabbed the right one.” She slumped against the wall behind them and tilted her head towards Felix. “We haven’t even left Fraldarius; why am I already exhausted?” she whined to him.

Felix moved closer, leaning against the side of the ship and tilting his head downwards to see her. He was also starting to feel exhaustion rush through him, settling in his bones. “Side effect of antitoxin?” he suggested. “Magic fatigue because you absolutely pummeled that guy? The first time you’ve had to run for ten minutes in the last five years because you’ve been slacking off on training?”

“Shut up Felix, I didn’t _pummel_ him,” Annette said, her cheeks flushing. “You make me sound like a pugilist.”

“So the compliment annoys you but ‘slacking off on training’ is totally fine?” Felix asked. “You haven’t changed much in five years, Annette.”

Annette scowled at him. “Training is for dorks,” she said, and it was assuredly not the best of times, but Felix smiled, anyway.

He looked up over her head to hide this. Sylvain and Mercedes still appeared to be arguing, this time about how to properly tie a sail down. Felix realized suddenly that it was possible that Mercedes actually had a lot more sailing experience than Sylvain – there was a lot of coast in Adestria. “Do you think Mercedes is going to want to take a look at that shoulder wound?” he asked, because he certainly didn’t know any healing magic.

Annette tilted her head towards their friends but didn’t quite make it. “Eventually,” she said. “They seem to be having fun for now, though.” She tilted her head back towards Felix. “We took those antitoxins; we’ll live. Right now I just kind of want to not move for a while.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Felix. Feeling was coming back in his arm but his entire body felt like jelly. He suspected that was more from the adrenaline drop after watching Annette throw herself at a man three times her size with a poisoned blade, but right now he didn’t have the energy to figure out why that made his heart race. He looked over at Annette, small and fragile and dazzling and dangerous as she slumped towards him, her eyes slipping shut. “Do you know any sea shanties?”

“No,” she snapped, her head coming to rest on his shoulder. But as the boat finally pushed off from the dock and began its voyage towards Derdriu, Felix could swear she was humming something, and her voice and the waves rocked them both to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> It’s [ Mere's ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightMereBear/pseuds/NightMereBear) birthday, and she wanted a fight on a ship and also a venin edge. And listen, Mere gets what she wants.
> 
> It’s a real shame there aren’t any good old fashioned ship battles in Three Houses, huh? This one goes out to all the ladies in the club that just kind of parked Zihark on one of the single-tile gangplanks and hoped for the best. We should’ve used Gatrie. What were we thinking.
> 
> This is the . . . third time I’ve written about the Blue Lions just trying to get to Garreg Mach for the Millennium Festival? Look, I don’t care what happens when they get to Garreg Mach, I only care about how much of a pain it must have been to get there in the first place. But! This is the first time they take a boat there, so see, I know how to mix things up.
> 
> [ I’m on twitter! Come say hi. ](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes)


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